Most lease accounting tools are calculation engines. They amortize the right-of-use asset and produce the schedule, which matters — but the schedule was never the hard part. The hard part is deciding what the contract actually is, documenting why, and defending that judgment months later to somebody who was not in the room.
The schedule is the easy half
Ask a technical accountant what consumes their time on leases and they will rarely say the amortization table. They will describe reading a 40-page master services agreement to work out whether it contains an identified asset. Or reconstructing, in the middle of fieldwork, why a renewal option was judged not reasonably certain of exercise eighteen months ago.
Those are documentation problems, not calculation problems. And they are where the audit questions land.
Embedded leases hide in plain sight
Judgments decay
Consistency across a portfolio
How Gaapio handles ASC 842
- 1
Abstract the contract. Upload the agreement to Contract Analysis. Gaapio pulls the terms that drive the accounting — commencement, term, renewal and termination options, payment structure, variable lease payments, residual value guarantees — and shows you where in the document each one came from.
- 2
Test for an identified asset and the right to control. The ASC 842 gate, applied to contracts that are not labelled as leases. This is where embedded leases surface.
- 3
Work the classification. Finance or operating, against the ASC 842 criteria, with the analysis written out rather than reduced to a conclusion. Where the answer turns on a judgment — the discount rate, a reasonably-certain renewal — the judgment is stated as a judgment, not smoothed over.
- 4
Draft the memo. A reviewer-ready technical accounting memo, with version history and sign-off, and every conclusion anchored to a Codification reference you can click through and verify.
- 5
Produce the disclosure. Quantitative and qualitative ASC 842 disclosure language, benchmarked against how comparable filers present the same items.
We use Gaapio's contract analysis constantly for new lease agreements, and it writes most of our technical accounting memos. The memos come out structured, well-supported, and grounded in actual ASC guidance, so we're not starting from a blank page and we're not second-guessing whether the references are real.
Controller, CPA
He ran a 842 memo, and it came out pretty spot on to the one he did manually — a good way to cross-check the work.
CFO · July 2026
Built for the review, not just the answer
The most common objection we hear about AI in technical accounting is not that it is slow. It is that it is confidently wrong — that it hallucinates against the guidance and plays yes-man to whatever the user seems to want. That objection is correct about general-purpose tools, and it is the reason this product is built the way it is. We didn't want AI to replace judgment — we wanted it to amplify it.
Anchored to the Codification
It tells you when it doesn't know
Consistent across the portfolio
A thought partner, not a thought leader
Where Gaapio fits alongside a lease subledger
If you already run a lease subledger, keep it. Those systems are good at schedules, journal entries and roll-forwards, and replacing one mid-year is rarely worth the disruption.
Gaapio handles the layer that sits above the calculation: what the contract is, why it was classified that way, what judgment was applied, and how that reads in a memo and a footnote. Teams generally arrive here after discovering that their subledger produces excellent schedules and no defensible documentation.
Frequently asked questions
See it on one of your own leases
Bring a real contract — ideally one you are not sure about. We'll walk the ASC 842 analysis with you and show you the citation trail.
Related
References: FASB ASC 842, Leases. This page is general information, not accounting advice for a specific entity.